


Worst Nights

by daxsymbiont



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, shatterdome as family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-22
Updated: 2013-10-22
Packaged: 2017-12-30 03:45:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1013698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daxsymbiont/pseuds/daxsymbiont
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a strange kind of power, being the guy who's awake in the wee hours of the morning, touting a creaky and outdated French press. Tendo has seen and heard things that are not, precisely, his to see and hear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Worst Nights

**Author's Note:**

> little unbeta'd Tendo fic because i love this guy and this is how i imagine him. i played kinda fast and loose with the timeline, non-linear story and all that crap.

There are things a person will admit over midnight coffee that they wouldn't divulge under any other circumstances. Tendo has come to understand this, over the years. He's in the droopy-eyelids phase of morning, nearing the end of his shift, staring muzzily at the quiet and inactive Breach while Jin Wei reads Lord of the Rings by his feet. Jin has his head on a throw pillow, flat on his back on the floor, holding his phone about two inches from his face. It's his fortieth read-through. He shows up at LOCCENT unannounced sometimes, pillow under his arm, when his brothers are making too much noise in his head. "They're so _loud_ ," he said the first time, frowning, as Tendo scrounged around for a packet of instant coffee. (It was only polite.) Jin gave no further explanation for his presence, and Tendo didn't ask. He offered up a sympathetic grimace and a porcelain cup of Nescafé, and went back to watching the controls.  
  
Jin takes his coffee with those disgusting little flavored creamers, three of them mixed in at once, but Tendo thinks he can forgive that. He's a generous man. Everyone has their faults.  
  
The sun is rising when he heads back to his quarters for a nap. Jin takes his leave with a nod and a smile. Tendo has no idea how jaeger pilots do it.  
  
***  
  
You get tied up in the end of the world, you forget. You lose days or weeks to bleary hypervigilance, strung out on the constant flow of work and the adrenaline that comes from always, always having to be _ready_. Your nerves wear down to thin, brittle threads. No signatures emerge from the Breach. Or they do. Or they don't. The hours blur together. You eat a lot of blue jello, which Ranger Hansen brings by from the cafeteria, mumbling something about vitamins and productivity and the Marshall. Apparently the jello is fortified. Cool beans. Max gazes up at you imploringly - he wants some too.  
  
You forget, you lose track, you've got nights where you turn into a wretched ball of useless human flesh - slamming your fist into the wall and hoping for a dent, but you only bruise your knuckles, gnawing on the edge of your pillow to stop a scream. It's okay, it's fine. You pray to a God you aren't really close with anymore.  
  
But.  
  
One of the first things you learn, over midnight coffee, is that every night is a worst night for someone. The Shatterdome runs on a series of worst nights. The point of total breakdown passes between residents like momentum in a Newton's cradle. Ping ping ping, seamlessly from ball to ball. But the machine as a whole remains intact.  
  
So, here's the thing, and Tendo is absolutely positive about this: the Shatterdome is like a living being. It's cohesive and organic, and the individuals within may slip out of alignment - they require calibrations, nudges and tweaks until they click back into place -- but you can always get the whole back to zero.  
  
You forget, caught up in the end of the world.  
  
 _You treat her like a lady, and she'll always bring you home._  
  
***  
  
It's a strange kind of power, being the guy who's awake in the wee hours of the morning, touting a creaky and outdated French press. (He rarely gives his visitors the good stuff, unless they're having an especially rough time - but there's always something. Tendo makes it his mission to have no less than four types of coffee within reach at all times.) Honestly, screw alcohol as a method of loosening tongues - coffee is scarcer these days, and a more potent truth serum. So Tendo has seen and heard things that are not, precisely, his to see and hear.  
  
He's seen Stacker Pentecost's hand rest at the small of Herc Hansen's back in a touch that could be considered not strictly professional. He's seen Pentecost, too, pace the halls and knead at his temples, muttering to himself: lines from _Harry Potter_ , from Sun Tzu, once "I'm not fit to be a father". Doubts that slip out in the dead of night. He has sat, bewildered, across from a shaky and euphemistic Dr. Gottlieb, as they each took their preferred form of caffeination in the mess hall. Gottlieb went on a protracted rant about Brahms and non-Euclidean geometry that Tendo eventually determined was a request for romantic advice. ("It's the end of the world, man," he told him. "What've you got to lose?" Dr. Gottlieb sniffed and implied that he had quite a lot to lose, thank you.)  
  
He's seen Chuck Hansen go still and silent.  
  
He's held Newt Geiszler's glasses, kept a soothing hand on his spine, while Newt vomited up alcohol and medicine and, once, a relatively-non-toxic fragment of kaiju skin. He's seen a lot of Newt, actually. Seen him huddled in the corner of LOCCENT hugging his knees, mouth stuck in perpetual speech, berating himself for imagined sins. _I'm a mess_ , Newt would say, _a failure, I don't deserve to be alive._ Tendo rubbed his back and stroked his hair and, when they got to that point, lent him porn.  
  
But he didn't think of it as a responsibility, only as a series of happenstances, until they were a couple years into the Becket brothers' run and the person in the cafeteria at midnight was Anya Gabori.  
  
She was new, she was nervous, she was homesick. Grew up in Seattle, fifteen when the kaiju hit, now an engineer doing maintenance on the Becket boys' jaeger. Except. She hated the name, couldn't stand to work in its vicinity, obviously had buried her anger for the greater good but it was wearing on her. Nobody needs a slur staring them in the face every time they make a repair.  
  
Tendo listened, and slurped his coffee, and went to Pentecost the very next day.  
  
Raleigh was almost painfully apologetic, lamenting his own ignorance for three hours straight until he got over himself and went to talk to Anya about the redesign. Yancy seemed to have outsourced any guilt to his brother. Pentecost thanked Tendo, thanked Ms. Gabori, sent out formal apologies, called up the graphic design team to request a modified logo. There was the question of the new name.  
  
It was Tendo who suggested Lady Danger, on a whim - sentimental and old-fashioned, but it got the job done. It was not, perhaps, the most intimidating name for a jaeger. (Though Sasha Kaidanovsky would beg to differ.) But it was a vast improvement on the original and Tendo found himself impossibly relieved, tension deflating as the Shatterdome swung back into sync.  
  
Sitting at his post, now, he thinks about power.  
  
Decides he doesn't want it.  
  
Shrugs, downs another gulp of coffee so fast and hard it burns his throat, and gets back to work.  
  
***  
  
After the Lady Danger incident, Tendo starts to make a point of noticing.  
  
You can do things, when you're the guy with the coffee at midnight. You can move the world. Tendo is the one who mentions to Aleksis Kaidanovsky, offhand, that Dr. Gottlieb looks cold all the time - and he smiles when the enormous parka makes its first appearance. He's the one who makes certain that the Shatterdome will be celebrating four New Years, minimum, and anyone who doesn't like it is missing out on some delicious holiday food. He jabs Herc Hansen about Pentecost's health until he's sure that Herc will jab Pentecost in turn. It feels good, to keep the dome alive.  
  
Mako Mori is fourteen when she first storms into LOCCENT far past her bedtime, arms crossed and eyes flashing. She doesn't say a word. Tendo blinks, shrugs, and slides a cup of decaf across the console at her first chance he gets. (Pentecost would kill him if it were regular.) Mako spends the next couple hours playing Scrabble on her phone. She gives Tendo a tight little smile and a stiff bow when she leaves, and he figures he must have done something right.  
  
When she's a little older, Mako will show up once or twice a week, perch on an empty swivel chair and keep Tendo company. She asks pointed, polite questions about the glowing displays in front of him. One night she appears and stares listlessly ahead, clutching her tablet, her face without its usual spark of mischief.  
  
Tendo turns in his chair. "What're you thinking about, Miss Mori?"  
  
"Kaiju," says Mako, and does not elaborate.  
  
It's Tendo who helps her put two green streaks in her hair, that night, over a sink in a coed bathroom. Later she'll change it to silver, then blue. He's the one who finds the dye, just like he finds poppyseed bagels, and hazelnut creamer, and Vicodin. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. For his Shatterdome. For his family.  
  
***  
  
Pentecost doesn't ask him about the name until Lady Danger has been ripped apart and refurbished, until Mako is working with Tendo on her rehabilitation. It's a quiet morning in LOCCENT, the Marshall merely checking in, and he stops with a hand on the back of Tendo's chair. "I'm curious," he says. "Why Lady Danger, of all things? I like it, but why?"  
  
"Oh, you know," says Tendo, and downs the remainder of his third cup of coffee that morning. He glances over his shoulder at the  Marshall. "It's the old adage. You treat her like a lady, and she'll always bring you home."  
  
Pentecost's voice is warm with amusement. "I never pegged you for a Trekkie, Mr. Choi."  
  
"I have good taste," says Tendo, puffing himself up.  
  
"No doubt," says Pentecost. His hand falls on Tendo's shoulder, for just a moment, a soft press of heat and then it's gone. Tendo will remember that when the two evac pods spring up at the ocean's surface, later, years later, when he's calling to Lady Danger's pilots and they're too wrapped up in each other to notice.  
  
His vision blurs, and he takes a moment to compose himself.  
  
 _You treat her like a lady, and she'll always bring you home._  
  
We did good, he thinks as they stop the clock. We did okay.


End file.
